Hurricane Sandy Takes Out Huffington Post, Gawker

Steve McCaskill is editor of TechWeekEurope and ChannelBiz. He joined
as a reporter in 2011 and covers all areas of IT, with a particular interest in telecommunications, mobile and networking, along with sports technology.

Sites affected include The Huffington Post, Gawker and Buzzfeed, which were all inaccessible at one point. Datagram, which provides corporate Internet connections and servers for those sites, lost power to its fibre network, while its backup generators also failed as the diesel fuel pumps were offline.

The company is based in Battery Park on a large area of reclaimed land that was in the evacuation zone in Lower Manhattan.

Huffington Post’s unexpected downtime

“Basement flooded, fuel pump off line – we got people working on it now. 5 feet of water now,” Datagram told Buzzfeed in a text message. Buzzfeed redirected its users to a tumblr page, but its main site was back online at the time of writing.

The Huffington Post also appears to be functioning properly again after the earlier outage.

“Due to power outages caused by Superstorm Sandy, our own website is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working around the clock to get the site back to normal,” said the site. “The news team, which has offices around the US and in other countries, is still monitoring everything and will be updating this page with the latest on the storm. We will also update our social media accounts, including Twitter and Facebook.”

However, Gawker’s main site still isn’t fully operational and currently redirects users to a backup page.

“Our New York City data centre is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site, but in the interim you can view updates at http://updates.gawker.com,” said Gawker, which had earlier alerted readers to the problems via Twitter.

Google cancelled its planned media event in New York yesterday as Hurricane Sandy advanced along the East Coast of the US. The storm hit land late last night and has caused widespread flooding and high winds across large swathes of the northeast of the country.

The search giant has rolled out a crisis map for the hurricane, allowing users to track the storm’s path and view other information such as power outages in the region. Google had only recently released Street View images documenting the reconstruction of New Orleans following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.